Part 12
“You have known it long!” he said, and she replied, “Yes.” Then they walked on, and the latch fell once more.
Erik could not sleep when he reached his room at last, after drinking coffee with the company and saying good-night at the street door.
There was no air in there; he flung the windows wide open, then threw himself on the couch and listened.
He wanted to get out again.
How everything resounded through the house! He could hear the Consul’s slippers, and now Mrs. Claudi opened the kitchen door to see if the fire was out. What in the world could Niels want in his trunk at this time of night! Ah—there was a mouse behind the wainscoting. Now some one crossed the attic in stocking-feet—now another—there were two.—At last! He opened the door to the guest-room within and listened, then he carefully opened the window, straddled over the sill, and slid into the courtyard. He knew that he could get down to the shore through the mangling-room. If any one saw him, he meant to say that he had forgotten his mandolin down by the jetty and wanted to rescue it from the dew. Therefore he slung the mandolin on his back.
The garden was a little lighter now; there was a slight breeze and a bit of moon which laid a tremulous strip of silver from the jetty out to the _Berendt Claudi_.
He went through the garden out on the stone sloping which protected it from the water, running in abrupt angles round a large embankment and all the way out to the end of the harbor mole. Balancing uncomfortably on the flat, slanting stones, he finally reached the molehead and, rather out of breath, sat down on the bench.
Above his head the red lantern of the harbor light swung slowly back and forth with a sound like the sighing of iron, while the flag line flapped gently against its staff.
The moon had come out a little more and cast a cautious grayish-white light over the quiet ships in the harbor and over the maze of rectangular roofs and white dark-eyed gables in the town. Above and beyond it all the church steeple rose, calm and light.
He leaned back dreaming, while a wave of unutterable joy and exultation surged through his heart; he felt rich and full of strength and the warmth of life. It seemed as though Fennimore must hear every love-thought that grew from his rapture, vine in vine, and blossom on blossom; and he rose, and quickly striking the strings of the mandolin sang triumphantly to the town asleep in there:
“_Wakeful aloft lies my lassie, She listens to my song!_”
Again and again, when his heart grew too full, he repeated the words of the old ballad.
Gradually he became calmer. Memories of the hours in the past when he had felt weakest, poorest, and most forlorn pressed in on him with a slight, tense pain like that of the first tears welling up in the eyes. He sat down on the bench again, and with his hand lying mute on the mandolin strings, he gazed out over the blue-gray expanse of the fjord, where the moon bridge formed a glittering way past the dark ship to the lines of the Morsö hills, drawn in faint, melancholy cloud-blue land through a haze of white.
And the memories thronged, but they grew gentler, were lifted to fairer lands, and seemed lighted by a roseate dawn.
... _My lassie!_
He sang it to himself:
“_Wakeful aloft lies my lassie, She listens to my song._”
_Chapter XI_
Three years had passed; Erik and Fennimore had been married for two years, and made their home in a little villa at Mariagerfjord. Niels had not seen Fennimore since that summer at Fjordby. He lived in Copenhagen and went out a great deal, but had no intimate friends except Dr. Hjerrild, who called himself old because touches of gray had begun to appear in his dark hair.
That unexpected engagement had been a hard blow to Niels. It had a benumbing effect on him. He grew more bitter and less confiding, and had no longer so much enthusiasm to pit against Hjerrild’s pessimism. Though he still pursued his studies, their plan was less and less definite, while his purpose of some time completing them and beginning his real life-work flickered uncertainly. He lived much among people, but very little with them. They interested him, but he did not in the least care to have them be interested in him; for he felt the force that should have driven him to do his part with the others or against them slowly ebbing out of him. He could wait, he told himself, even if he had to wait till it was too late. Whoever has faith is in no hurry—that was his excuse to himself. For he believed that, when he came down to the bedrock of his own nature, he did have faith strong enough to move mountains—the trouble was that he never managed to set his shoulder to them. Once in a while, the impulse to create welled up in him, and he longed to see a part of himself freed in work that should be his very own. For days he would be excited with the happy, titanic effort of carting the clay for his Adam, but he never formed it in his own image. The will-power necessary to persistent self-concentration was not in him. Weeks would pass before he could make up his mind to abandon the work, but he did abandon it, asking himself, in a fit of irritation, why he should continue. What more had he to gain? He had tasted the rapture of conception; there remained the toil of rearing, cherishing, nourishing, carrying to perfection—Why? For whom? He was no pelican, he told himself. But argue as he might, he was dissatisfied with himself and felt that he had not fulfilled his own expectations; nor did it avail him to carp at these expectations and ask whether they were well founded. He had reached the point where he had to choose, for when first youth is past—early or late in accordance with each person’s individuality—then, early or late, dawns the day when Resignation comes to us as a temptress, luring us to forego the impossible and be content. And Resignation has much in her favor; for how often have not the idealistic aspirations of youth been beaten back, its enthusiasms been shamed, its hopes laid waste!—The ideals, the fair and beautiful, have lost nothing of their radiance, but they no longer walk here among us as in the early days of our youth. The broad, firmly planted stairway of worldly wisdom has conveyed them back, step by step, to that heaven whence our simpler faith once brought them down; and there they sit, radiant but distant, smiling but weary, in divine quiescence, while the incense of a slothful adoration rises, puff on puff, in festive convolutions.
Niels Lyhne was tired. These repeated runnings to a leap that was never leaped had wearied him. Everything seemed to him hollow and worthless, distorted and confused, and, oh, so petty! He preferred to stop his ears and stop his mouth and to immerse himself in studies that had nothing to do with the busy every-day world, but were like an ocean apart, where he could wander peacefully in silent forests of seaweed among curious animals.
He was tired, and the root of his weariness sprang from his baffled hope of love; thence it had spread, quickly and surely, through his whole being, to all his faculties and all his thoughts. Now he was cold and passionless enough, but in the beginning, after the blow had fallen, his love had grown, day by day, with the irresistible power of a malignant fever. There had been moments when his soul was almost bursting with insane passion; it swelled like a wave in its infinite longing and frothing desire; it rose and went on rising and rising, till every fibre in his brain and every cord in his heart was strung tense to the breaking-point. Then weariness had come, soothing and healing, making his nerves dull against pain, his blood too cold for enthusiasm, and his pulse too weak for action. And more than that, it had protected him against a relapse by giving him all the prudence and egoism of the convalescent. When his thoughts went back to those days in Fjordby, he had a sense of immunity akin to the feeling of a man who has just passed through a severe illness and knows that now, when he has endured his allotted agony, and the fever has burned itself to ashes within him, he will be free for a long, long time.
Then it happened, one summer day, after Erik and Fennimore had been married for two years, that he received a half-whining, half-boasting letter from Erik, in which he blamed himself for having wasted his time of late. He did not know what the matter was, but he had no ideas. The people he met in the neighborhood were fine, jolly fellows, no conventionality or nonsense about them, but they were perfect dromedaries with regard to art. There was not a human being he could talk with, and he had gotten himself into a slough of laziness and stagnation which he could not pull out of. He never had a glimmering of an idea or a mood, and never felt inspired. Sometimes he was afraid that his power had run out, and that he never would do anything any more. But this could not possibly go on forever! It must come back; he had been too rich to end like this, and when it came he would show them what art was, those fellows who painted away all the time as if they had learned it by rote. For the present, however, he was as if bewitched, and it would be an act of friendship if Niels would visit Mariagerfjord. They would make him as comfortable as circumstances allowed, and he could just as well spend his vacation there as any other place. Fennimore sent her love and would be glad to see him.
This letter was so unlike Erik that Niels saw at once there must be something serious amiss or he would not complain in this fashion. He was aware, too, of how little volume there was in the wellspring of Erik’s production—a slender stream only, which unfavorable circumstances could easily dry out. He would go at once! For all that had happened, Erik should find him a faithful friend; whatever the years had loosened of old ties and uprooted of old illusions, he would at least know how to guard this old friendship of their childhood. He had helped Erik before, and he would help him now. A fanaticism of friendship possessed him. He would renounce his future, fame, ambitious dreams, everything, for Erik’s sake. All that he owned of smoldering enthusiasm and creative ferment should be Erik’s; he would merge himself in Erik with his whole self and all his ideas, holding nothing back, keeping nothing for himself. He dreamed of greatness for the friend who had torn his life asunder so roughly, and saw himself blotted out, forgotten, impoverished, deprived of his intellectual heritage; and he went on dreaming that his gift to Erik should become no longer a loan, but Erik’s very own, as he coined it into works and deeds and gave it his stamp. Erik in honor and glory, and he himself one of the many, many commonplace folk and nothing else; poor, at last, by necessity, not by choice; a real beggar, not a prince in disguise.... And it was sweet to dream himself so bitterly humble.
But dreams are dreams, and he laughed at himself, as he thought that people who neglect their own work always have no end of time to interest themselves in that of others. It also occurred to him that, when he came face to face with Erik, the latter would, of course, disclaim his letter and pass it off as a joke. He certainly would think it extremely absurd if Niels were actually to present himself with the announcement that he was ready to help him recover his creative power. Nevertheless he went. In his inmost heart he believed that he could do some good, and no matter how much he tried to explain it away or cast doubts upon it, he could not rid himself of the feeling that it really was the friendship of their boyhood which had reasserted itself in all its old simplicity and warmth, in spite of the years and what the years had brought.
* * * * *
The villa at Mariagerfjord belonged to an elderly couple who had been forced by ill-health to make their home in the south for an indefinite period. They had not intended to rent the place, as they had started out with the idea of returning after six months, and therefore had left everything just as it was. So when Erik leased the house fully furnished, this was so literally true that he got it with bric-à-brac, family portraits, and everything else, even to an attic full of decrepit furniture with old letters in the drawers of the secretaries.
Erik had discovered the villa when he left Fjordby after his engagement. As it contained everything they needed, and as he hoped to go to Italy in a year or two, he had persuaded Consul Claudi to postpone the purchase of household furnishings for a while. They had moved into Marianelund very much as into a hotel, except that they brought a few more trunks than travellers usually carry.
The house fronted the fjord, less than twenty feet from the water, and was rather ordinary in appearance. It had a balcony above, a veranda below, and at the back a young garden with trees no thicker than walking-sticks, but from the garden one could step right into a magnificent bit of beech woods with heathery glades and wide clefts opening between banks of white clay, and that made up for many shortcomings.
This was Fennimore’s new home, and for a while it was as bright as happiness could make it, for they were both young and in love, strong and healthy, and without a care for their means of subsistence, either spiritual or material.
But every palace of joy that rises heavenward has sand mixed in the earth on which it is founded, and the sand will collect and run away, slowly perhaps, imperceptibly perhaps, but it runs and runs, grain by grain.... And love? Even love is not a rock, however much we may wish to believe it.
She loved him with her whole soul, with the hot, tremulous passion born of fear. He was to her much more than a god, much nearer—he was an idol, whom she worshipped without reason and without reserve.
His love was strong as hers, but it lacked the fine, manly tenderness that protects the loved woman against herself and watches over her dignity. Dimly he felt it as a duty, which called him sometimes in a faint, low voice, but he would not hear. She was too alluring in her blind love; her beauty, which had the provocative luxuriance and the humble seductiveness of the female slave, incited him to a passion that knew neither bounds nor mercy.
In the old myth about Amor, is it not told somewhere that he puts his hand over Psyche’s eyes before they fly away, rapturously, into the glowing night?
Poor Fennimore! if she could have been consumed by the fire of her own heart, he who should have guarded her would have fanned the flames; for he was like that drunken monarch who swung the incendiary torch, shouting with joy to see his imperial city burn, intoxicating himself with the sight of the leaping flames, until the ashes made him sober.
Poor Fennimore! She did not know that the hymn of joy can be sung so often that both melody and words are lost, and nothing remains but a twaddle of triviality. She did not know that the intoxication which uplifts to-day takes its strength from the wings of to-morrow, and when at length sobriety dawned, gray and heavy, she realized tremblingly that they had loved themselves down to a sweet contempt for themselves and each other—a sweet contempt which day by day lessened in sweetness and became, at last, utterly bitter. They turned away from each other as far as they could; he, to dream about his betrayed ideal of lofty coldness and scornful grace; she, to gaze with longing despair at the dim, quiet shores of her girlhood days, now so immeasurably far away. With each day that passed, it seemed harder to bear; shame burned madly in her veins, and a suffocating disgust with herself made everything seem wretched and hopeless. There was a small deserted room containing nothing but the trunks she had brought from home, and there she would often sit, hour after hour, until the sun sank over the world out there and filled the room with reddish light. There she tortured herself with thoughts sharper than thorns and scourged herself with words more stinging than whips, until she was stupefied by misery and tried to deaden her pain by throwing herself down on the floor as something too full of corruption and dregs—a carrion of herself—too foul to be the seat of a soul. Her husband’s mistress! That thought was never out of her mind; with that she threw herself in the dust and trampled on herself; with that she barred every hope of regeneration and turned every happy memory to stone.
Gradually a hard, brutal indifference came over her, and she ceased to despair, as she had long ceased to hope. Her heaven had fallen, but she did not try to raise the vault again in her dreams. The earth was good enough for her, since she was but of earth, earthy. She did not hate Erik, nor did she draw away from him. No, she accepted his kisses; she despised herself too much to repulse them, and besides, was she not his wife—his woman?
For Erik, too, the awakening was bitter, although his man’s prosaic common sense had warned him that some time it must come. When it really came, however, when love no longer gave boot for every bane, and the veil of gleaming gold in which it had descended to earth for him had been wafted away, he felt such a sinking of his spirits and such a sluggishness creeping over all his powers that he was angered and alarmed. Feverishly he turned to his work to assure himself that he had lost nothing else besides happiness, but art did not give him the answer he hoped for. He got hold of some unlucky ideas which he could not do anything with and yet could not make up his mind to abandon. Though they refused to take shape, they continued to tease his mind, and prevented other ideas from breaking through or absorbing his energy. He grew despondent and dissatisfied and sank into a moody idleness, since work was so confoundedly perverse, and since, of course, he had only to wait for the spirit to move him again. But time passed; his talent was still barren, and here by the quiet fjord there was nothing that could fructify it; nor were there any fellow artists whose triumphs could spur him on either to emulation or to creative opposition.
This inactivity grew unbearable. He was seized with a violent craving to feel himself, no matter how or in what, and since nothing else offered, he turned to a crowd of older and younger men about the neighborhood who enlivened the dulness of country life by such dissipations as their limited fancy could invent and their rather one-sided taste could savor. The kernel of their pleasures was always drinking and cards, no matter whether the shell enclosing them was called a market-day or a hunt. Nor did it make any particular difference that the scene was occasionally laid in a small neighboring town, and certain real or imagined business was transacted with the tradesmen during the afternoon; for the bargain was always closed at night in the tavern, where the discriminating landlord always showed persons of the right stripe into Number Caveat. If there happened to be strolling players in town, the tradesmen were let go, for the players were more sociable, did not shy at the bottle, and were usually ready to undergo the miraculous—though never quite successful—cure of drinking themselves sober in gin after getting drunk on champagne.
The leader of the crowd was a hunting squire of sixty, and its main stock was made up of small landowners and country gentlemen in the neighborhood, though it also included a massive young dandy of a brandy-distiller and a white-necked tutor, who had not been a tutor for twenty years or more, but had gone as a vagrant from house to house with a sealskin bag and an old gray mare, which he used to say he had bought from a horse-butcher. He was a silent drinker, a virtuoso on the flute, and was supposed to know Arabic. Among those whom the squire called his “staff“ were also a solicitor, who always had new stories to tell, and a doctor, who knew only a single one from the siege of Lübeck in the year 6.
The members of this band were widely scattered, and it scarcely ever happened that they were all together at one time, but whenever any one stayed away from the company too long the squire would issue a summons to the faithful to inspect the renegade’s oxen, which all understood to mean that they should quarter themselves upon the unfortunate man for two or three days and turn his house upside down with drinking, gambling, and whatever rustic amusements the season afforded. During such a punitive visit, it once happened that the whole party was snowbound, and the host’s supply of coffee, rum, and sugar ran out, so that they were reduced to drinking a coffee punch boiled of chicory, sweetened with sirup, and strengthened with brandy.
It was a coarse-grained crowd of boon companions that Erik had fallen in with, but perhaps people of such tremendous animal vitality could hardly find sufficient outlet in more civilized amusements, and their unfailing good humor and broad, bruin-like joviality really took away much of the grossness. If Erik’s talent had been akin to that of Brouwer or Ostade, this choice band of revellers would have been a perfect gold mine to him. As it was, he got nothing out of it except that he enjoyed it very much, too much in fact, for soon this wild racketing became indispensable to him and took up nearly all his time. Now and then, he would blame himself for his idling and vow to end it, but whenever he made an attempt at working, the sense of blankness and spiritual impotence would come over him again and drive him back to the old life.
The letter to Niels had been framed one day when his everlasting barrenness had made him wonder if his talent had been attacked by a wasting disease. As soon as it was sent, he regretted it, and hoped that Niels would let his plaint go in at one ear and out at the other.
But Niels he came, the knight-errant of friendship personified, and was met with that mixture of rebuff and pity which knights-errant in all times have encountered from those in whose behalf they have dragged Rosinante out of her snug stable. As Niels was tactful, however, and bided his time, Erik thawed before long, and the old intimacy was soon established between them; for Erik’s need of pouring himself out in complaint and confession had grown into an almost physical craving.
One evening after bedtime, when Fennimore had retired, they sat over their cognac and water in the dark sitting-room. Only the glow of their cigars showed where they were, and once in a while, when Niels leaned far back in his chair, his upturned profile would stand out black against the dark window-pane. They had been drinking a good deal, Erik especially, while they sat talking of the time when they were boys at Lönborggaard. Now Fennimore’s departure had made a pause which neither of them seemed inclined to break, for their thoughts came stealing upon them in a pleasant languor, as they listened drowsily to the singing of their blood, warm from the cognac.
“What fools we were when we were twenty,” came Erik’s voice at last. “God knows what we expected and how we had got it into our heads that such things were on earth. We called them by the same names that they bear in reality, but we meant something entirely above and beyond comparison with this tame sufficiency that we’ve got. There isn’t much to life, really. Do you think so?”
“Oh, I don’t know; I take it for what it is worth. We don’t generally live very much. Most of the time we only exist. If you could get life handed to you in one whole large, appetizing cake that you could set your teeth in ... but doled out in bits!—no, it’s not amusing.”